As Roberto Santo Gomez looked back on his life, he felt like he hadn’t amounted to much. He was empty inside and his heart was filled with hate. As a member of the leftist Zapatista rebel group, his work involved shaking down people for money, running drugs and fighting the government. But that hadn’t given his life meaning, and now he felt trapped by the Zapatista “cause.” After considering his options, Roberto decided he would go north to the United States and try to make some money. As many others had before him, Roberto hopped the train that runs from Chiapas in southern Mexico to the U.S. border. The trip didn’t go as planned, however. Roberto fell from the train, severing his left arm and leaving him with multiple fractures. As he lay on the ground in agonizing pain, he suddenly recalled the words of a street preacher he’d once heard in a park, and his thoughts turned to God. “God, if you exist, give me another opportunity,” he prayed. “Give me life, and I’ll get up and I’ll look for you and I’ll speak about you.” God answered Roberto’s prayers. He survived the accident, returned to his home and,
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“Give us more!” the robbers demanded. It was 9 p.m., and Faisal’s Bible distribution team was eager to be home. After delivering Bibles to eleven Pakistani villages in three days, they had taken a shortcut to get home faster. But as the team slowed their old van to navigate a bumpy stretch of road, they found themselves surrounded by a band of robbers notorious in that part of Pakistan. Rajehs, one of the workers riding in the van, tried to reason with the six armed men as one of them pointed a gun at the driver and another held a gun against a passenger’s leg. “We’ve given you everything,” Rajehs told them. “Why do you want to kill us?” But even as they were rolling down their windows to hand over their valuables, he knew that the robbers would likely force them out of the van and shoot them one by one. “We have Bibles,” offered 13-year-old Amber, the team’s youngest member. “Please take a Bible.” “We don’t need it!” a robber screamed, throwing the Bible down. A mile and a half ahead of them on the road, Pastor Faisal and the rest of the team waited nervously in the
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Both Anam and Rania have suffered greatly because of their Christian faith, but their work among persecuted Christians has brought unexpected healing from deeply rooted hate. As one of Pakistan’s Christian minority, Anam experienced persecution and harassment throughout her life. And for much of her life, she had an understandable hatred for her persecutors. “I started to hate Muslims after my uncle’s death,” she said. Anam looked up to her Uncle “Naimat,” a smart schoolteacher who had always encouraged her in her studies. They shared a love of poetry, and Anam hoped to be just like him when she grew up. Naimat, the only Christian teacher working at his school, tried to stand up for his students’ best interests. When his Muslim colleagues sent students on personal errands, Naimat intervened and told the students to use their time wisely on their studies. After he was eventually promoted to the position of school principal because of his exemplary work, Naimat’s colleagues became deeply jealous. They hated him so much, in fact, that they hired a hit man to kill him, telling the killer that Naimat had blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad. On Jan. 6, 1992, the hired killer stabbed Naimat to death
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In a small, dimly lit office in a Middle Eastern country, Khaled sits quietly on a couch with his hands folded in his lap and scans the room. This is where he’ll share the darkest memories of his family’s lives as Christians in Yemen — a country he and his four children fled following the silent martyrdom of his wife, Samira. He’s surprisingly calm as he prepares to share the gritty details of his journey out of Islam and the countless incidents of persecution his family experienced as a result. He knows there’s a purpose to the pain he and his children still feel today. “When I think about our story, the only thing I can think is that God is preparing us for something bigger … to serve Him,” Khaled says smiling. “It is in layer after layer of persecution that He changes us to be like Him.” A Student of Islam Khaled’s story of persecution begins where his faith in Islam ended. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Khaled led the call to prayer at his mosque in Yemen. Doubts about his father’s strict Wahhabism had already left cracks in his Muslim faith. Later that day, when
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Just 10 days after Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister, Pratik and his family were targeted by Hindu nationalists. Reaching Pratik’s house requires a bumpy drive down a narrow dirt road through a forest of sunlit coffee trees. Winding through the 10-acre coffee plantation, the road suddenly takes a sharp right turn before dropping down a steep hill. At the bottom of the hill — away from everyone else — sits his family’s small home. In another part of the world, the house might feel like a peaceful hideaway. In southern India, however, Pratik and his family feel trapped. They’ve felt this way since June 4, 2014, when about 30 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) members stormed into their house, forced Pratik, his wife, Dharmi, and their elder of two teenage daughters into SUVs and drove them to the nearest Hindu temple to be “reconverted” to Hinduism. Their younger daughter managed to escape the Hindu nationalists, who are working to return India’s population to its Hindu roots. Life as Christians surrounded by 400 Hindu families had never been easy for Pratik’s family, and it has become even more difficult since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister. Modi is a long-time RSS
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A year after facing persecution for the eighth time, 90-year-old Jatya is prepared to suffer yet again. Jatya is eager to share the evidence of his faithful evangelism with visitors. The frail yet energetic man lives in southern India, in a village heavily populated with paid informants for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS, a national volunteer organization with more than 5 million members, intimidates and even forces Christians to return to their nation’s “Hindu roots.” One of Jatya’s most prized possessions is a manila packet stuffed with photos and newspaper articles recounting the eight times he has been beaten for sharing the gospel in his village. It all started in 1992, when Jatya refused to sign a document promising to stop evangelizing. Police officers responded to Jatya’s stubbornness by breaking all of his fingers. Three years later, Hindu radicals beat him and dragged him to the police station, where he spent a week in jail. And the scars on Jatya’s left arm and hand are constant reminders of the third time he was persecuted for his faith; a Hindu neighbor whipped him with a bicycle chain, causing severe lacerations. After each brutal beating, however, Jatya returns home from
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“No, you cannot tell others about Christianity!” the teacher scolded. “You cannot do this because Christianity is an American religion and a very bad religion.” The high school teacher’s harsh words neither surprised nor discouraged young Hanh. Ever since seeing how the gospel had changed his alcoholic father, he had wanted to follow Christ and tell others about Him. But being a Christian and sharing your faith in communist Vietnam are not without consequence. Sharing Christ is illegal, and Hanh knew it. Those who evangelize are harshly reprimanded. Some have been fined or kicked out of school, while others have been beaten, imprisoned and expelled from their villages. Hanh is one of several dozen young Vietnamese Christians completing a Bible study on the life of Christ. The group first began meeting two days a week to go through the six-book series, but their hunger to learn was so great that they decided to meet nightly. After being confronted by his angry high school teacher, Hanh prayerfully considered his response. “I will stop following Christ if you can explain one thing for me,” he said. “Why does the cow eat grass, which is green, but when it creates milk it is
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When the airport security officer tapped me (Petr) on the shoulder and motioned for me to follow him, I didn’t think much of it. It was Dec. 10, 2015, and I was heading home after spending four days in Sudan meeting with Christians and evaluating how VOM could help the church there. With my boarding pass in hand, I assumed I was merely being given an extra security screening at Khartoum airport. Everything seemed routine until the officer spread several photographs before me on a table. I stared in shock at photos taken of me outside my hotel and other photos of me at a restaurant where I had shared a meal with a Sudanese pastor. Clearly, I had been under surveillance by Sudanese police ever since entering the country. I looked nervously at my watch. My plane was about to take off, and I wasn’t going to be on it. Instead, I was being falsely charged with multiple crimes, including espionage and entering Sudan illegally. Prepared for Suffering When I was a teenager, my father handed me a book one day and said simply, “You should read this.” And that was how I got to know Richard Wurmbrand. The
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Walter was a new Christian, and he was scared. Most people in his village thought anyone who left Hinduism was rejecting Indian culture, so Christians were highly criticized by their neighbors. Although Walter was reluctant to talk about his faith, he admired his pastor’s boldness. Eventually, he decided to visit a neighboring village with Pastor Joseph. When a Hindu family asked them to pray for a sick family member, they gladly entered their home. But when they walked back out, about 50 men were waiting for them. The mob began to beat them and smash their vehicle with sticks. They looted their vehicle and dragged the Christians to the police station, where they were thrown in jail. Pastor Joseph lost four teeth in the beating, and Walter was covered with bruises. But the pastor was undeterred. As he crouched on the dirt floor of the jail cell, still aching from the beating, he couldn’t stop talking about Jesus with other prisoners in the cell. Walter watched as three of his cellmates gave their lives to Christ. Suddenly, something inside him overflowed. He turned to the prisoner slumped beside him. “Do you know that Jesus loves you?” he began. The man
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As Rebekah stood on a hill just outside her Nigerian village one hot day in 2014, she could do nothing but watch as her house and church burned to the ground. She and her neighbors were devastated at the sight of their village in flames and helpless to defend themselves against the heavily armed Boko Haram militants who had caused the destruction. But for Rebekah, that wasn’t the worst of it; she later learned that her husband and one of her sons had been killed in the attack. Seven months after Rebekah’s life was so radically altered by the Islamist attack, Nigerian military forces pushed Boko Haram out of the region. Though the destruction was widespread, government authorities allowed Rebekah and the other villagers to return to the charred remains of their homes to reclaim what was left. As she sifted through the ashes, Rebekah’s heart filled with hope at the discovery of her burned but still usable Bible. She bent over, carefully picked it up and brushed away the ashes. “Thank you, Lord,” she sighed. Although parts of Genesis and Revelation were burned, the rest of her Bible survived intact. As she continued to mourn the loss of her
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